Murder During the Hundred Year War: The Curious Case of Sir William Cantilupe

By Melissa Julian-Jones

This in-depth study of a fourteenth-century murder explores the social fabric of the era through a tale of scandal and conspiracy among a noble family.

In 1375, Sir William Cantilupe was found murdered in a field outside of a village in Lincolnshire. As the investigation progressed, fifteen members of his household were indicted for murder, and his armor-bearer and butler were convicted. Through the lens of this murder, Melissa Julian-Jones explores English society during the Hundred Years War, from crime and punishment to social norms and sexual deviance.

Cantilupe’s murder was one of the first case to be tried under the Treason Act of 1351, which deemed the murder of a man by his wife or servants to be petty treason. It reveals the deep insecurities of England at this time, where violent rebellions within private households were a serious concern. Though the motives were never recorded, Julian-Jones considers the evidence as well as the relationships between Sir William and the suspects, including his wife, servants, and neighbors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526750808

Book preview

Murder During the Hundred Years’ War

Murder During the Hundred Years’ War

The Curious Case of Sir William Cantilupe

Melissa Julian-Jones

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

Pen & Sword History

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire – Philadelphia

Copyright © Melissa Julian-Jones 2020

ISBN 978 1 52675 079 2

eISBN 978 1 52675 080 8

Mobi ISBN 978 1 52675 081 5

The right of Melissa Julian-Jones to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

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Contents

Who’s Who

Chapter 1 The Discovery of a Body

Chapter 2 Sir William de Cantilupe the Younger

Chapter 3 The Indicted Suspects

Chapter 4 Motives for Murder: Material Gain/Loss

Chapter 5 Motives for Murder: Affairs of the Heart

Chapter 6 Motives for Murder: Communal Revenge or Communal Vengeance?

Chapter 7 Justice, Law Enforcement and Cross-County Networks

Chapter 8 The Trial’s Outcome and Aftermath

Appendix

Notes

1. For more on the ballad, see: William Montgomerie, ‘The Twa Corbies’, The Review of English Studies , 6:23 (Jul., 1955), 227–232.

Who’s Who

The Cantilupe Genealogy (Abridged)

Chapter 1

The Discovery of a Body

‘Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest’

W. H. Auden

The main focus of this book, the murder of Sir William de Cantilupe in 1375, is an intriguing tale, and the telling of it covers a lot of ground. We know how he was killed, who were accused and who was convicted, but apart from this we know very little. We do not have the witness testimony, any record of private correspondence, or even a suggested motive, since these elements were not recorded in the court rolls. Discovering the reasons for William’s murder involves understanding the context of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire society, the fissures and feuds in his social network, and digging into fourteenth-century life. Comparing other murder cases is also useful; murder rates were exceptionally high at this time, so there are no shortage of examples.

In exploring Sir William’s context, this book necessarily touches upon a variety of issues that some readers may find distressing or difficult, including domestic violence and sexual assault, and, where Sir William’s brother Nicholas is concerned, a traumatic experience of having, in this case, atypical genitalia, in the Middle Ages. This latter issue is both pivotal to understand the circumstances of Nicholas’s death and Sir William’s own arrest for his older brother’s murder, but also to understand the reasons why certain nobles were embroiled in the case, such as the family of Nicholas’s ex-wife. However, readers should be warned that the ways in which medieval thought equated androgyny and ‘hermaphroditism’ with monsters and mythical creatures, not to mention the events themselves which caused a crisis within the Cantilupe family, do not make easy reading.

These subjects are necessary to fully understand the circumstances of Sir William’s murder, and form the backbone of the debates around why he died, since motive, typically for the time, is not recorded in the trial records. Similarly, investigating other examples of murders, from the killing of husbands by their wives, knights by their squires and armour-bearers, and masters by their servants, needs to be considered if we are to fully explore the myriad possibilities. The jurors convicted two people for the murder, but whether they were truly guilty or not will never be known – they never changed their ‘not guilty’ plea, but neither did anyone else indicted for the murder. As the story progresses, it is left to the reader to make up their own mind about the most likely scenario and the most likely culprits, and whether the verdict was correct or fair.

While Sir William’s life and times will be discussed at length, it seems most fitting to begin where the fourteenth-century investigation itself began: with the coroner, the sheriff, and the discovery of the body.

Late May in rural Lincolnshire was at the heart of the agricultural seasons that governed the lives of its inhabitants. A fair few tenants of the local manors were doubtless praying for a good harvest that year, but for the villagers of Grayingham, the fields were about to reveal a rather gruesome surprise.

The body of a man around 30 years of age had been lying undiscovered for several months, presumably in a ditch that prevented it being spotted sooner. He was dressed in riding clothes, a belt around his waist and spurs at his heels. The first finder raised the hue to alert the sheriff and the coroner, who would be responsible for the ensuing investigation.¹ Finding a body was a serious matter. The village was now collectively responsible for it, and could face a steep fine if it could be proved that they had hidden it or covered it up for any reason.

The body should not be moved from its position, no matter how inconvenient it was, until the coroner arrived to begin his inquest. In London or other urban centres, anyone found dead in the street or in the middle of a busy thoroughfare was generally moved into a house and laid out there for the examination to take place, but in more rural areas the bodies were preserved in situ for as long as possible. If the coroner were delayed, the finders had to preserve the scene and corpse as best they could until his arrival. In an age without instant communication, the inquest might begin several days after the discovery. A message had to be sent to wherever the coroner was known or thought to be, which might be in the city of Lincoln some miles away, and if he was away on other business (the role of coroner was, after all, unpaid), then the delay might be longer. In one instance, a Devonshire coroner was forced to delay an inquest by eight days, during which time the locals had to construct a hedge around the body to protect it from the elements as best they could and post guards to prevent any human or animal interference.²

In this case, the coroner for the riding of West Lindsey was a man named William de Kirkton or Kirton, of whom personally little is known. He was a wealthy merchant based in London in his late forties or fifties, but was himself a Lincolnshire man whose family were originally from the village of Kirton, as his name suggests. Also involved in the investigation was the sheriff of Lincolnshire, Sir Thomas de Kydale. Younger than William de Kirton, Sir Thomas was a widower in his late thirties or early forties, and the father to a young son of around 10 years of age who was also named Thomas.

William de Kirton viewed the body where it was found and determined that the man had been dead for some months, the remains affected by exposure and animal activity, but on stripping the body and turning it over, carefully looking for wounds and contusions and feeling for broken bones, the cause of death was obvious. Beneath the shirt the coroner discovered ‘diverse mortal wounds’ caused by a blade. William de Kirton’s job was to measure the stab wounds where possible and make notes on their depth, breadth and shape. The quality of the man’s clothes, the details of the belt and spurs, all pointed to the fact that this was a member of the knightly class, very likely a member of the local elite community. He was quickly identified as Sir William de Cantilupe the younger, of whom nothing had been seen since at least Easter that year, and that meant two possibilities. Either it was a case of murder by highwaymen or robbers on the road, or they were looking at a far more serious charge, that of petty treason. Murder was bad enough, but petty treason, the slaying of a man either by his wife or by his servant, represented a subversion of the social order.

The coroner’s conclusions and the sheriff’s investigation led to a major trial in Lincoln at the court of the King’s Bench. In all, fifteen people were indicted for the crime, including members of the local elite, and eventually, despite consistent not guilty pleas by every single one of the accused, two individuals were finally convicted and hanged on the (uncorroborated) eyewitness testimony of another chief suspect.

The trial and its background, with the many twists and turns leading up to Sir William’s death, have long been of interest to legal scholars and more recently to scholars concerned with medieval marriage and constructions of gender identity. A traditional interpretation of events, filling in the unfortunate gaps in the evidence with some assumption and conjecture, has been presented and accepted largely uncritically by all who have considered the case.

This book is not an attempt to ‘uncover the truth’. That is not possible to do with the surviving evidence, which does not include witness testimonies or private, unrecorded conversations, or even a great deal of information about the individuals concerned. Historical detective work of this type can be frustrating, especially when there is so much ‘reading between the lines’ to do, and it is tempting to construct narratives that fit the surviving evidence. For this reason, context is crucial – in order to consider the most likely scenarios, it is important to know as much about the background as possible, and try to understand human behaviour under various circumstances. Using this case as a window, the world of fourteenth-century England will be explored and a number of possibilities set out for the reader to consider. The ‘traditional’ interpretation of the case, first proposed by Rosamund Sillem in the 1930s, framed it as a conspiracy masterminded by Lady Maud, Sir William’s widow.

Considering various motives for murder and alternative interpretations of the events of 1375, the following chapters will explore who Sir William was, his family context and what it meant to be a man of his social standing, and look at who benefitted from his death. Each motive – money, sex, revenge, jealousy – offers ways to consider the society in which he lived, with examples of comparable crimes. These will be considered in their own chapters, allowing for a much fuller consideration of the evidence than has been applied to the material to date, and a consideration of the trial and its aftermath for the people concerned.

Medieval Murder in Context

Detective stories have captured the imagination for centuries. The questions of who killed another person and why have occupied the thoughts of more than just law enforcement officials, as the ‘peculiarly English genre’ of the amateur detective can attest.³ However, this is far from being the preserve of nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular crime fiction. The twelfth-century Life and Passion of St William the Martyr of Norwich, completed 1172/73 by Thomas of Monmouth, is one such example, as confidence in St William’s sanctity rested on who had killed him and how they had killed him. Thomas of Monmouth set himself up as the amateur detective to piece together the evidence and construct William as a holy martyr, and his case for William’s martyrdom is outlined in the first two books of his seven-volume work.⁴

Medieval fascination with this kind of crime did not begin and end with the saints. If the murdered person was a significant individual in terms of socio-economic status, people were just as interested by the circumstances and details of their death as at other times in history, even though murder rates were comparatively high.

The diatribe of Burchard of Worms, an early eleventh-century bishop, encapsulates the common perceptions of the prolific nature of medieval violence:

Homicides take place almost daily among the family of St. Peter, as if they were wild beasts. The members of the family rage against each other as if they were insane and kill each other for nothing … In the course of one year thirty-five serfs of St. Peter belonging to the church of Worms have been murdered without provocation.⁵

Yet Burchard’s complaint is somewhat disingenuous – when people did kill one another, it usually wasn’t ‘for nothing’.⁶ To borrow a phrase from James Buchanan Given, whose research focused on medieval homicide and inquisition, murder is a social act.⁷ The interactions between two or more people resulting in acts of murder can horrify and fascinate, particularly in cases where the killing itself seems, on the surface, senseless or irrational. Yet beneath this are complex layers of psychological and sociological processes, and, like every other form of human behaviour, even murders that appear motiveless are not without social meaning.⁸ This was as true at any point in human history as it is today. Violence of the kind condemned by Bishop Burchard was often intrinsically part of family feuds and acts of vengeance for slights (even perceived slights) which could turn bloody and brutal.⁹ While the officials of fourteenth-century England might have liked to think they were more sophisticated than their forebears, violence and feuding were impossible to prevent, and additionally, homicidal acts were not only committed in this context, but also out of the usual oldest human motives: love/lust, revenge, jealousy, and material gain.

Whatever the reasons, it is an undisputed fact that interpersonal violence (whether it led to death or not) was a recurring fact of life in the Late Middle Ages at all levels of society. Some studies have estimated that the murder rates in thirteenth-century England were about twice as high as they were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which were themselves five to ten times higher than the 1980s.¹⁰

Coroners’ rolls for this period reveal regional patterns to violent crime, which help in understanding how ‘typical’ this murder case of 1375 was, and what the coroner may have expected based on his experience and the experiences of his fellow officials.

Firstly, based on recorded eyewitness testimony and estimated times of death found recorded in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century coroners’ rolls for Northamptonshire and the cities of Oxford and London, a murder victim was most likely to be killed in the evening or at night, and at a time of year when the population were most active.¹¹ While in Oxford the majority of violent deaths occurred in the academic term, in rural Northamptonshire the number of deaths was greatest between March and August, following the shift of agricultural seasons.¹² This pattern followed the changes in social activities through the year, food shortages and competition for resources and jobs, and the fact that the longer daylight hours meant more social interaction.¹³ March-August was also when the majority of deaths by misadventure occurred, especially in the fields.

By contrast, in Oxford, the summer had the lowest rates of violent death due to the absence of the clerks from the university in the summer vacation. In London, an urban centre whose population worked and socialised together all year round, the murder rates showed very little seasonal variation at all.¹⁴

In rural Lincolnshire, a similar pattern to the Northamptonshire rolls would be expected. A body found in a field in May fits the pattern quite well, and the coroner would, so far, be unsurprised. From experience, he would also be expecting a man to have committed the crime: assuming that the pattern held across the shires, in rural Northamptonshire, 99 per cent of murders or manslaughters were committed by men. In clerk-dominated Oxford the rate was 100 per cent, and even in a more diversely populated urban centre like London, the figure was 93 per cent, and even among the 7 per cent of murders committed by women, there was often a male accomplice.¹⁵

Given these statistics, a coroner like William de Kirton, faced with evidence of a violent crime, would be forgiven for assuming that he was looking for a man or a group of men. After all, of the other murders and violent crimes committed in Lincolnshire and heard at the Sessions of the Peace from 1373–75, the vast majority had been committed by men.

William de Kirton’s examination of the body, as decomposed as it was by then, revealed ‘diverse mortal wounds’. Sir William de Cantilupe the younger had been stabbed multiple times, and the coroner was satisfied that these wounds were the cause of death. If it were more likely that Sir William had been murdered by a man or more than one man, then who could have done it and why?

First Impressions: the Highwayman Ruse

The most obvious solution, given that Sir William was dressed in his riding clothes, was that he had been accosted on the road and killed by highwaymen. But how likely was this? Why did Kirton and Thomas de Kydale discount this idea and pursue the young knight’s household and his wife if a gang of ruffians was the most obvious conclusion to draw?

First, given the number of stab wounds Kirton had found during his examination, he would have expected the shirt to have corresponding rips and blood stains, but reading between the lines of the later testimony, that was apparently not the case. If the shirt had been ruined by decomposition and animal activity this would have been more difficult to see at first, but Kirton was not fooled. It was apparent that despite the attention to detail – the belt and spurs Sir William was wearing – these were not the clothes he had been killed in. This logically meant that the change of clothes was a ruse intended to throw suspicion on strangers, and therefore away from people Sir William probably knew. As to whom these people might be, their identities came to light when the investigation into the late knight’s household began, led by Lincolnshire sheriff Sir Thomas de Kydale.

The ruse may have worked better if Sir William’s killers had paid closer attention to detail, as law enforcement officials would have been familiar enough with criminal bands roaming the countryside: they were a real threat to merchants, and bands of men occupied in daylight robbery and extortion rackets operated across the country.

‘Highway robbery’ has become synonymous with romantic eighteenth-century figures like the English Dick Turpin or the sixteenth-century Welsh ‘Robin Hood’, Twm Sion Catti, but it was in fact a much older crime that was very common in medieval England. The sheriff may well have suspected such a criminal band, but this did not narrow down his search for the perpetrators even to a section of society. The existence of such a gang would not have ruled out any of the local gentry or even clergy; this was the standard pattern for such bands from the previous century, too, and could have involved people from all levels of society including the royal court.

In 1248, for example, a daring robbery of foreign merchants who were ambushed at Alton, Hampshire, directly involved members of King Henry III’s own household. A large gang waylaid the merchants in a forest and got away with thousands of pounds’ worth of cash and goods, which they split between them. King Henry was understandably embarrassed, and made a furious, impassioned speech on the subject denouncing the perpetrators, but the householders in question alleged (to the king’s further embarrassment) that they had been driven to robbery because of the lateness of their pay.¹⁶ In the fourteenth century, more organised criminal gangs whose activities formed a way of life rather than a one-off event, like the infamous Folvilles and their counterparts, the Coterels, were the landed gentry of their localities. Both gangs moved around frequently and operated in more than one shire, looking for new opportunities to pillage and steal, but also to evade capture.¹⁷

The first record of the Coterels’ criminal activities is dated 2 August 1328, but the story began a little further back. Master Robert Bernard, king’s clerk and a teacher at the University of Oxford, had been instituted as vicar of Bakewell church, Derbyshire, in 1327, but on Christmas Day of that same year certain of his parishioners attacked him during the service, stripped him of his Eucharistic vestments and ejected him from the church.¹⁸ This was quite a statement, and not the kind of thing that Master Bertrand, whose extracurricular activities included embezzlement and failure to pay stipulated charitable sums to the poor, took lying down. In 1328 he instigated the Coterel brothers – James, John and Nicholas – along with their (aptly named) associate Roger le Sauvage and their followers – to attack Walter Can, his replacement at Bakewell.